8 Google Analytics Metrics Every Business Must Track Regularly

Are you tracking the right Google Analytics Metrics for your business? Although Google Analytics is one of the Best Web analytics tools that enables you to easily monitor website traffic and analyze user behavior, it provides so many different numbers and trends that it can be difficult to figure out what’s important and what isn’t. There are so many different ways to grow website traffic but unless you’re optimizing the right website metrics, you won’t be able to attract, convert and retain customers for your business. Here are 8 Most Important Google Analytics Metrics that every business must track to grow faster and drive more revenues.

8 Most Important Google Analytics Metrics for your Business

1. New Visitor Conversion

It’s important to measure conversion rates for new visitors separately from that for returning visitors. This will enable you to understand what new visitors see when they visit your website and how they interact with it. It will also help you understand what you need to do to improve the first visit and overall first-time user experience for new visitors. A new visitor is seeing everything on your website for the first time and won’t know any tricks to use your website better. If your website has poor design, or isn’t user friendly, it is bound to have low new visitor conversion rate. So, improving new visitor conversion rate will enable you to reduce bounce rate for new visitors.

2. Traffic Sources

You need to clearly know from where your website visitors arrive on your site. Ideally, it’s good to have a variety of traffic sources to your website, instead of getting visitors from just a few traffic sources. Google analytics helps you track visitors from 3 categories of website sources – direct visitors, search visitors and referral traffic.

Direct visitors – These are website visitors who arrive at your site by typing the actual URL of your website, in the address bar of their web browsers

Search visitors – These are people who visit your website by entering a search query and clicking a link to your website from the search results.

Referral visitors – These are website visitors who have arrived by clicking on a links to your website, on other website or blog that they were browsing.

Each traffic source is important and has its own conversion rate. So you need to monitor website visitors and conversion rates from each traffic source and take appropriate actions to increase traffic and conversion rates.

3. Pages per Sessions

Pages per Sessions is a key Google Analytics Metric that enables you to understand user behavior on your website – how many pages they visit per session, what exactly are they doing, how to make them do more of it and how to persuade them to actually convert. For example, you can track the page view rates to understand how much time they spend on your site, which pages they visit the most, which path they take to navigate your website. You can use these insights to transform these interactions into actual conversions – downloads, purchases, subscriptions and more.

4. Returning Visitor Conversion

Returning visitor conversion rate is the percent of returning visitors that have converted on your website. They may not have converted as new visitors, but your website did leave a lasting impression on them to drive a return visit. It’s important to track returning visitor conversions to see how you can increase it. For example, some businesses offer exclusive offers and discounts to returning visitors, while others ask them to complete a survey or join their mailing list to stay informed about the latest offers.

5. Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate is the percent of website visitors who leave your website from the landing page, without browsing further. It indicates the number of people who leave after browsing just a single page on your website, without interacting with it or spending much time on it. The lower the bounce rate, the better it is. A high bounce rate indicates that your website visitors didn’t find what they’re looking for on your website, or that they’re not relevant traffic in the first place. It can even mean poor usability and website design. So it’s important to find out the causes of high bounce rate, by using a chat widget on your site to interact with visitors or mailing your customers for feedback, and take actions to lower bounce rate.

6. Exit Pages

An Exit Page is the last page visited by a website visitor before he leaves your website. Exit Pages enable you to find the most common website pages where visitors leave your site, so you can find out why visitors leave your site through those pages and you can modify their content to retain visitors. For example, you may find that visitors leave your website on the checkout page, simply because it’s too complicated. You can add a live chat widget to help out customers with the checkout process, find out which aspects of your checkout page they find cumbersome, and modify it accordingly to retain visitors.

7. Page Views

Pages views is the number of views of a page by a website visitor. A high page view can indicate that your content is high quality and in-depth causing visitors to revisit that page. It can also indicate that people are unable to find what they’re looking for, during their first visit to your page, or they’re simply reloading your page because it’s not loading quickly on their desktops or it’s not responsive on their mobiles. So it’s important to find out why your pages have high page views, and determine if you need to do something about it.

8. Average Session Duration

Average Session Duration is the amount of time a person spends on your website, during a single session on it. It’s one of the most important Google Analytics metrics that indicates the relevance of your website to its visitors. The more relevant your site, the more time your visitors will spend accessing information that is interesting to them, and the higher the average session duration. You should aim to increase session duration of your website visitors by providing useful and interesting content on your website. However, if your session duration is high and your bounce rate is also high, then it means your web pages have a lot of information and it might be a good idea to break the content into multiple interlinked pages to make it easier for users to digest it.

Conclusion

Once you know the important Google Analytics Metrics to track for your business, you can create appropriate marketing goals to improve them, and use Google Analytics in the most optimal way to grow your business. Tracking the right Google Analytics Metrics enables you to easily find out what’s working and what isn’t, quickly spot issues and take action, and effectively monitor the performance of your marketing campaigns to increase website visitors, improve conversion and boost retention.

About Sreeram Sreenivasan

Sreeram Sreenivasan has worked with various Fortune 500 Companies in areas of Business Growth, Sales & Marketing Strategy. He’s the Founder of Ubiq BI, a cloud-based BI Platform for SMBs & Enterprises.